How Email Personalization Turned Customer Data Into ROI
A noisy, generic inbox presence was remixed into data-fueled email personalization that spiked engagement, tightened the customer journey, and drove measurable ROI.
A high-end kitchen appliance manufacturer needed a clearer way to measure marketing impact across a long sales cycle and a two-tier distribution model. Because the brand did not sell directly to consumers, customer-level attribution could not tell the full story.
Drumline used Funnel Geometry, an aggregate time-series modeling approach, to understand how media tactics influenced funnel-stage KPIs over time. The analysis helped the client see how awareness, consideration, and intent tactics worked together, then translate those findings into more confident media planning decisions.
With a substantial investment in online media, our client, a high-end kitchen appliance manufacturer, employs various tactics to move consumers through the purchase funnel, from awareness to consideration to intent.
While driving qualified leads is a critical goal of media campaigns, the client’s long sales cycle and two-tiered distribution model make it difficult to track a user accurately through a sale. As a result, demonstrating the value of marketing activities, particularly upper-funnel media, channel interactions, and their impact on sales, poses a challenge.
Our client and its media partners faced data gaps and difficulties in accurately attributing sales back to marketing efforts.
While the focus had traditionally been on driving website traffic and generating appointment bookings, visibility along the long path to purchase often diminished thereafter. Collaborating with the media team to understand the client’s highest priority questions about media performance, we identified an approach that blended elements of both bottom-up and top-down marketing measurement methodologies. This approach aimed to provide rapid answers to questions about the impact of different media channels, their channel interactions, and their influence across the purchase funnel.
Traditionally, tools that marry technology and analytics, such as multitouch attribution, are used to document customer journeys. However, such customer-level analytical approaches require a substantial investment in technology infrastructure.
Furthermore, for businesses like our client’s, customer journeys are substantially longer. Consideration for these nuances in customer paths to purchase must be accounted for when evaluating marketing impact on leads or sales.
We decided to use a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model, coined “Funnel Geometry,” which uses aggregate-level time-series data to analyze the dynamic relationship between media tactics and funnel-stage KPIs over time.
To provide actionable recommendations, effective collaboration between our team and the media planners was crucial.
This collaboration involved comprehensive discussions that incorporated insights from the business, media, and analytic perspectives. By reframing the model’s output into strategic and realistic media recommendations, we ensured that its findings aligned with the media planners’ goals and supported smarter marketing impact measurement.
The results derived from the Funnel Geometry model:
Complex customer journeys do not have to mean cloudy measurement. If your team is trying to understand how marketing channels interact, which tactics deserve more investment, or how to measure media impact when attribution is incomplete, Drumline can help turn the noise into a clearer plan of action.
A noisy, generic inbox presence was remixed into data-fueled email personalization that spiked engagement, tightened the customer journey, and drove measurable ROI.
A tangled, underperforming martech stack was rebuilt into a streamlined, insights-first engine that aligned teams, unlocked smarter automation, and drove a clear lift in marketing ROI.
Have a data or analytics challenge you’re wrestling with? Get in touch via our Contact Us page and let’s see how we can move your organization forward.